Yesterday, feminists from the National Organization for Women and the National Women’s Law Center picketed Congress. Their message: “Laid off workers need a real economic stimulus plan from Congress.” The Independent Women’s Forum agrees. But the radical feminists and their allies in Congress don’t know what a real stimulus package looks like and are using a national crisis to load up on pork-barrel spending. What the country needs now is sound economic and national security policies, not political posturing.

What we’re getting from Senate Democrats is pure pork — including $10 million for the North American Bison Cooperative and millions more for poultry and agricultural interests in Democratic senators home states.

Nancy Mitchell Pfotenhauer, president of the IWF, says, “The men and women who have lost their jobs or been laid off during this economic downturn need one thing above all — new jobs. Jobs are the result of economic growth, and growth is fueled by tax cuts.”

“When money is put into the hands of job creators — the entrepreneurial men and women of America — it creates the incentive to build business and hire new workers. The best way to do that is to implement the marginal income tax rate cuts that are to begin in 2004, and that apply to every level of income.”

“The free market works,” says Pfotenhauer. We know that marginal tax rate cuts provide the impetus to save and invest, a principle that has fueled the economy from Presidents Coolidge to Kennedy to Reagan. But businesses and consumers cannot spend money that is in the hands of the federal government to redistribute among special interests.

The Independent Women’s Forum urges Congress to put the jobless back to work by leaving more earnings in the hands of those who earned it. As it has in the past, this investment will stimulate economic growth so that business can once again start hiring.